Life in Thesis-land : mondays

Red Lentil Soup

Karen.Hall — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:02:00 GMT

In further proof that Mondays are my day for attempting maintain delusions about myself as simultaneously domestic goddess and organised and enthusiastic member of the university community I've started up a soup club for Monday lunchtimes. For those of you who haven't been brainwashed since an early age to the strange rituals of teachers, this idea comes courtesy of North Woodvale Primary and my mother. Soup club involves designating a day of the week as soup day, then gathering people willing to cook and consume soup. I'm informed that multiples of four work best - one average soup batch feeds four, and with each person taking a turn at being soup provider, you only have to cook once a month. (By changing soup for salad in warm weather, this scheme can work year round). This is my first attempt at such a club, and so we are starting small with four members. I was the inaugural soup provider, and choose an apple-free soup recipe from The Rest of the Best, a cookbook brought back from Canada by my aunt. I don't know if it's the cold weather there that forces them to characterise their national cooking with strange food combinations ('Oh look, we're snowed in' 'That's okay, I can put together this apple juice, canned artichokes and fennel and make soup') but to my eye, some of the recipes are more for reading than cooking. Nonetheless, and despite my chronic inability to follow a recipe exactly as stated (it's improvements, really), the red lentil soup was a success.

Red Lentil Soup

Chop one brown onion (fairly rough chopping is fine) and saute until golden (or if you are me, get distracted by cutting up plums for stewing until the onions are about to burn, then stir vigorously). Add 3 cloves of garlic and a stick of celery, both chopped finely; two carrots chopped to your size of preference; about 1/2 a cup of sundried tomatoes chopped as much as they will let you (or, if you have a Canadian style properly stocked pantry, 1 can of chopped tomatoes - I, being non-Canadian, had to improvise with picnic leftovers); and two fresh bay leaves (dried is fine if you don;t have a shrub and are looking for reasons to justify its existence) and saute for two minutes, seasoning with black pepper. Add 1 cup red lentils, 2 cups vegetable stock, 3 cups water (this is unusually precise for me) and simmer until the lentils are tender (the recipe said 20 minutes, I let it go for as long as it took me to make a potato, spinach and ricotta bake which may have been in the vicinity of that time). Stir in some fresh chopped basil and either serve, or leave to cool, put it in a water-tight container, refrigerate, and remember to bring to uni the next day.

Random Bullets of Good Morning

Karen.Hall — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 01:06:00 GMT

I caught public transport to uni this morning. Getting to campus without the 78 buses sucks. Having your front numberplate fall off your car in the middle of the freeway sucks. I suspect that my interchange at lunchtime with the lisencing department will - guess what - suck.
Nonetheless, there is cheerful old-school jazz turned up loud somewhere below my window. And I have coffee.
I attempted to explain Grey's Anatomy to my parents last night, as they are staying at my/their house during their trip up to the big city. I think I lost them at 'dead fiance who is still around in spirit'.
But the Tour de France was well and truly worth staying up for! The prologue was great for 'I've been there!' place-spotting, and Robbie McEwan's win in stage one was amazing. And he thanked his team-mates for helping him get back to the peleton after the crash, which was just gorgeous. Yay for sharing and caring in sport.
I'm not talking about the football. Bloody East Fremantle bad luck bloody heritage jumpers. I might have to switch to the WAFL - go Tigers!
My office is tidy and shiny and new! I love having an office. Pictures to come soon.

Leek and Marscapone Gnocchi

Karen.Hall — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:51:00 GMT

My first run of this recipe involved a pleasing amount of home-made/grown ingredients, with the exception of the gnocchi (which I know how to make but decided not to, in the interests of dinner before 9pm). But I like the recipie so much I made it again on the weekend, proving that shop-bought ingredients may not be as good for the soul, but they still taste okay.

Ingredients

2 baby leeks fresh from the garden/half a normal, shop leek
1 clove garlic
butter
cream
mascapone (surprisingly easy to make at home, but shop will do)
gnocchi
Parmesan
salt and pepper

Method

Slice up the leek, and finely chop the garlic. Saute in butter over low heat until soft, adding salt (not much) and pepper to taste. In the meantime, boil water in a saucepan. Add two large tablespoons of mascapone and a good splah of cream to the leeks, stir until the mascapone melts in. When the water is boiling in the saucepan, add gnocchi. When the gnocchi start to float, spoon them out and into the sauce. Turn off heat on sauce, grate over Paremsan, stir all together. Eat!

I'm sure this isn't good for your arteries, but it suits the witner weather.

Breakfast (Hang-over) Bake

Karen.Hall — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 07:09:00 GMT

This recipe comes from my sister, and today seems a good day to share it - given the suspiciously quiet Scholars Centre. The Breakfast (Hang-over) Bake has all the important post-big night out breakfast components, and is prepared in advance, so all you need to do is put it in the oven while getting more water and painkillers the next morning.

Prepare the night or day before you want to eat it: Line a casserole/baking dish with at least two layers of baking paper. Cover the bottom of the dish with hash brown. Break eggs over the hasbrowns (roughly one egg per has brown) and break up a little with a fork. Sprinkle diced bacon on top, then grated cheese. Pour over cream (use un-whipped whipping cream, not thickened cream) till it reaches about 1/2 to 2/3 the height of the other ingredients. Cover with alfoil and put in the fridge.

Next morning (or afternoon): Set oven to 180 degrees. Bake for 2-3 hours, leaving dish uncovered for the last 15 minutes to brown the top.

Enjoy! (Or at least, try to keep it down.)

not!Key Lime Pie

Karen.Hall — Mon, 07 May 2007 09:55:00 GMT

What do you do if you have a surplus of limes lying around the house? This is obviously one of the great existential questions in life, which I was forced to confront this weekend after I got suckered into the on-sale limes from the fuit and vege shop last week. They were looking yellow and rather miserable, so something had to be done. Normally limes equal gin and tonic, but I'm a seasonal drinker and despite the sunshine this really isn't gin and tonic weather - one of the good things about winter being that I end up with a bootle of red wine on the kitchen bench, on hand for drinking or cooking or both, following the Ian Parmenter school of wine should be drinkable if it is used in cooking. Luckily for my budget I have low standards of drinkability, though not as low as my grandfather and his $3.99 specials, which, pray god, won't be available soon because of the drought.

So, limes somehow word associated to key lime pie - obviously, I didn't have the extra special key times but hey, right type of citrus at least. The internet gave me 101 versions, so I went with the simplest version, ending up something like this:

Grate the zest of two ordinary limes. Don't grate your fingers, as having lime juice around will make this an even more painful mistake. Juice the limes plus another three. At this point I went out and did grocery shopping plus a visit to the plant nursery to get some native violets, a bay shrub (for my shrubbery!), and potting mix. That is obviously an optional part of the recipe.

Make a biscuit base by crushing about 8 granita biscuits, then adding enough melted butter that it starts to hold together when pressed. Cut out a circle of baking paper to fit in the bottom of a spring-form cake tin, then put the biscuit crumbs in and press down. Bake for 180 degrees celcius for 10 minutes-ish.

Separate 4 eggs. Take the yolks and beat until creamy and lighter yellow. Put aside the egg whites for something else, like egg-white omlettes. What do the diet-crazy people who live on egg-white omlettes and chicken do with the egg yolks? Most of the recipes I know using egg yolks and decadently evil dessert things. How does this fit? I've always wondered.

Stop wondering and mix in most of a tin of sweetened condensed milk. If I translated the American recipe right, you want 350g of milk, but the tins seem to all be 395g (again, why? This seems a very arbitrary number). If your house and family is like mine, the leftovers won't last long anyway. Then slowly drizzle in the lime juice, mixing as you go, and then the zest. The key lime pie websites all proudly proclaimed that the sweetened condensed milk comes from this recipe being invented before refrigeration, and presumably, there being no cows in Florida for on-the-spot milk delivery. It is comforting to know that when the apocalypse comes, and all I'm left with is my mothr's stash of canned goods, I will have dessert options. The other fact for the day is that the reaction between the acid in the lime juice and other ingredients 'sets' the mix, but in these days of food hygiene consciousness, we are supposed to bake the pie anyway. I went the safe option and put the milk mix on top of the pie base and baked for 12 minutes (12 being hygienically significant, apparently).

The pie actually ends up looking more like what I'd call a tart - but then I couldn't have wandered the house on Sunday going mmm pie.

Broccoli and Blue Cheese Soup

Karen.Hall — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 02:43:00 GMT

Monday recipies are back! And now that the weather is cooling down, it's the perfect time for soup.

Broccoli and Blue Cheese Soup
(warning: if anyone in your house doesn't like these ingredients, wait till they are out for the evening, as the house will smell like the soup for some time.)

Ingredients:
1 head broccoli
1 brown onion
nob of butter
chicken stock
pepper
blue cheese (cheap stuff is okay)

Method:
Roughly dice the onion, then chop up the broccoli florets and some of the stem to similar size pieces. Saute in butter, adding some black pepper (salt isn't needed) to taste, until the onions are translucent. Add stock until the broccoli and onion are covered plus about half again. Simmer until everything is soft. (This was another Grey's Anatomy cooking session, so a couple of adbreaks later works for me). Take off heat, stir in blue cheese (again, amount to taste) until melted in. Then eat.

monday music selection

Karen.Hall — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 09:06:00 GMT

This morning I opened up iTunes and pressed play on Mermaid Avenue (Billy Bragg and Wilco). Over the day, Bing Crosby (skipped quickly), Bob Dylan, Bon Jovi, Carus and the True Believers, the Buffy Musical, Cat Empire, Chris Isaak, and (at the moment) Coldplay have all appeared. I tend to hit play and leave it, tuning in and out depending on how much I'm concentrating. This method can leave me with strangely appropriate, amusingly inappropriate or totally wrong soundtrack for the day.

In a moment I'll switch over to Magic Dirt, which I have found (for me anyway) is THE music for marking.

Random Bullets of Mondayness

Karen.Hall — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 06:00:00 GMT

My dog decided to do a reverse re-enactment of the standard WWII POW drama last night: he dug his way into the vegetable garden under the fence, then spent hours barking because he couldn't figure out how to get out. I found this out at 3ish in the morning. I am tired and unamused. The majority of the pumpkin seedlings survived.
I love reticulation systems. However, I am totally useless when it comes to putting them together or repairing them - though having the power on helps.
You can tell when I'm trying to get into writing mode: I use waaaay more colons and semi-colons than usual. That being said, there is nothing wrong with enjoying your punctuation.
Signs that you are shopping in a centre making a strong stab at gentrification: an advertisement for people looking for the perfect present for new mothers, which is - apparently - brie. I will bear that in mind.
When fashion says that sack-style short dresses made of grey t-shirt material are in, just say no to fashion. Please.
Obviously, I went shopping this weekend. I have now purchased all the Easter supplies I should need. This did not help with my attempts to cut down on chocolate consumption.
Mmmm, chocolate.

Okay, back to work.

Sometimes (TV) life requires cupcakes

Karen.Hall — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:06:00 GMT

In honour of my sister's new 'crystal-look' Tupperware cakestand (it is actually blatantly plastic and rather tacky) I made cupcakes on the weekend. I tried to be good and leave the majority uneaten so they could be displayed, but the various emotional traumas in Grey's Anatomy had to be redressed by cupcake consumption, and so the few survivors ended up looking rather forlorn.

White Chocolate and Raspberry Cupcakes

1/4 cup butter or margarine
1/4 cup castor sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup flour
good handful on white chocolate melts
8 frozen raspberries, crumbled

Cream butter and sugar, stir in egg then flour. Mix in the chocolate (sampling optional) and raspberries. Spoon mix into paper tins in muffin tray, bake in 200degree oven for approx 15 minutes. Makes 6 (or 10 if you go for mini-cupcakes). I iced the cakes by briefly microwaving 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp white chocolate melts (on a low setting), then mixing in about 1 tbsp icing sugar. Ice cakes before the mixture cools.

Pottage of Goat

Karen.Hall — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 09:13:00 GMT

or, I hacked up a leg: how did you spend your weekend? The leg in question was the goat's: it arrived on my doorstep, frozen in goatsicle form, on Thursday night to be defrosted over Saturday and dismembered into gobbets of flesh on Sunday. It was for a medieval(oid) feast and so the recipe below follows medieval tradition in leaving out details such as measurement and times - rather, you are left to cook by taste and feel on the day.

Ingredients: goat, onion, white wine vinegar, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, saffron, beef stock (or goat if you have it), egg yolk, breadcrumbs, olive oil, parsley

Instructions: saute the onions till softened, splash in vinegar, once the vinegar has cooked off, add chunks of goat and brown. Add spices (should be dried and ground expect for the saffron) then beef stock, leave to simmer. Just before serving, ladle some of the liquid into a bowl with the egg yolks, stit to combine, then return to the pot. Stir in breadcrumbs and chopped parsley.

Chicken Cous-Cous Bake

Karen.Hall — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 08:12:00 GMT

In my search for recipes that require minimal effort, minimal dishes and use up things lurking in the pantry and fridge, I bring you Chicken Cous-Cous Bake.

Ingredients:

1 chicken *** (skinless because I am slack and picky, free-range because I feel guilty, Mt Barker because I like their ad)
1 cup Israeli cous-cous (BIG cous-cous balls - use ordinary if you want)
1 lemon
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp capers
chicken stock
black pepper

Method:

Watch Grey's Anatomy. In ad breaks, run to the kitchen and cut chicken into chunks. Throw chicken in baking dish, sqeeze in lemon, throw in cous-cous. Next ad break, finely chop garlic and capers, add to dish. Grind pepper over the top, splosh in stock until the ingredients are covered, stir everything round. Set oven to 200 degrees celcius, put dish in oven. Watch more Grey's. After about half an hour (once the chicken is cooked), remove from oven, spoon into bowls and eat in front of the TV.

(Also, Matt, no one has asked me about my spectacular bruise. I am very disappointed!)

ETA: the first ingredient seems to be blocked by myresearchspace. Think bits of chicken that begin with b.

Pancetta+Cheese Things (with digressions on bakeware)

Karen.Hall — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 04:28:00 GMT

The extremely eloquent title of this recipe is a step up from the listing it had when planning my sister's Tupperware party on the weekend: at that point, it was known as 'Karen's things' - a possibly disturbingly ambiguous title.

(Tupperware, for those of you who haven't had parties of it descend upon you, has rather interesting gender politics, and there may be a post on this in the future.)

But for now, the recipe:

12 slices of pancetta (I prefer mild, but you can use the chilli style)
120g ricotta
30g goats cheese
1/2 cup parmesan (grated)
finely sliced chives or very-tiny baby leek

Arrange the pancetta slices in muffin tins to form a cup/shell thing. Mix the cheeses and chives, then spoon into the pancetta shells. You can place 1/2 a cherry tomato on top.

Bake in moderate oven for about 15 minutes (longer in mine, but my oven isn't efficient). Then eat!

Last night I used my Christmas present friand tin baking tray (the muffin tins had been taken over by mini-quiches), made of silicon. Ever since this type of silicon bakeware came out I've been bemoaning the end of civilisation as we know it; 'That's just not right. It looks like it will melt. What's wrong with the way things are done now. I don't like this progress thing... etc etc.' So, of course, I was given some.

I feel rather vindicated in reporting that I will continue to use metal bakeware. The silicon did not melt, the garish pink colour did not turn up in my food, but the edges don't seem to turn out as crispy as when metal is used (this may be an advantage to cake baking, though). Also, it is too floppy to grab and move around the kitchen only using one hand - and when you cook like I do, with many things all happening at once, that is a definite disadvantage. I'll stick with my old-school baking habits, thank you.

Frozen Grapes

Karen.Hall — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 04:38:00 GMT

In the last few days of hot weather, I've found that the satisfaction of not having an air-conditioner and thus not increasing my ecological footprint even further doesn't really help keep you cool. So I've been trying old-fashioned things like trips to the beach, fans, closing up the house, opening up the house, phoning a friend in the UK to hear about their weather...

And in this heat, the last thing you want to do is cook, or even eat. So this week's recipe is:

Frozen Grapes

Buy seedless grapes, take them home and wash them. Place in freezer. Eat once frozen.

Lemon Yogurt Cake

Karen.Hall — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 02:05:00 GMT

I'm starting a new tradition for this blog: Monday recipes. Inspired by grand cooking plans I come up with all week, but only get around to making on Sunday afternoon. This week we have:

Lemon Yogurt Cake with Marscapone

(recipe based on one from the Restaurant Widow, but altered)

Ingredients:

Slightly less than a cup of natural yogurt
1 tbsp cream
12 tbsp melted butter
4 eggs
zest from 1 lemon
2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar
pinch of salt

(for the syrup)

1/2 cup lemon juice
splash of vodka (lemon flavoured if you have it)
1/2 cup caster sugar

(for the marscapone)

however much marscapone cheese you have lurking in the fridge/ 1 small container

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 160 degrees celsius. Grease muffin tins (2 trays with 6 holes in is ideal).

Mix yogurt, cream, lemon juice, butter, eggs and zest in one bowl. In another bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ones, stirring together until you have a moist-ish batter. Spoon dollops of batter into the muffin tins. Bake for 25 minutes (until the batter is set and properly cooked, but before the top starts browning).

While the cakes are baking, make the syrup by combining the ingredients in a small saucepan and stirring over a low heat until the the sugar has dissolved. Leave to cool.

Take cakes out of oven, leave to cool for 10 minutes. Remove from tins, placing cakes upside-down on a wire rack. Using a pastry brush, baste the bottom of the cakes with the syrup. Leave for a bit, then turn the cakes and baste the top. Repeat if you feel the urge.

There should still be some syrup left over. Mix it in with the marscapone cheese, then serve the cakes with a dollop of the marscapone on top.

Eat cake!

Caffeine Zombie

Karen.Hall — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 01:19:00 GMT

Need coffee. Or brains. But preferably coffee.